You say: but don’t souls return to the mountain—walk leaf-littered paths through the forest of the living? The dead, of course, shuffle paved roads,

forever highways, strafe deserts, molten rock.But how do you warm the departed? With broken bread and communion, my love.

With the blood of wilderness—& wind. Or not, or not.

CASSANDRA’S SMOKE

That foul breath of the city waters the eye,

but the nose, self-assured, carries on—

embracing whatever comes its way: sweat, perfume,

fungal spores lofted over mountain ranges

in puffed up storm clouds,

jagged desert-dust, bits of life dredged up.

Still, the megaphone urges you to waltz to pass the long-short-long time

in a park, where old fools battle crickets and compare bird feathers,

where dogs rut and shit, where artists seek the ears

of trees and pansies

and crumbling brick— but through a riptide

of taxis and buses burns carbon dioxide

you hear voices in hard labor,

and behind closed rooms,

you hear something like knowledge,

clearing its throat.

ALMOST TAX FREE

And silver the tears, the Moon’s harrowed lament— she who had once loved immeasurably. “Money,” Uncle Fortunato said, “is portable power— why else do we In God Trust? The word credit, comes from ‘crede,’— to believe. I know from experience, to be happy with money is to be fanatically blind.”

People asked me over there on the other side of the world, What’s your interest? Are you creditworthy? Have you had your neck dragged down with bulging silver purses, been prodded with a loanshark’s knife? And, did I know those sweet medieval Florentines paid for everything in oranges so artists could inspire grandness.

Whispering, they suggested I maintain a second book, a ledger where transnational mysteries might be captured. “In the end,” they said, “the damned become divinities.” “And who,” they said, “doesn’t think they were smarter than the ones that came before?”

And: “Isn’t every empire built on borrowed money;” or, “where the hell do you find, that transcendental subprime?

“The euthanasia of the bondholder is the drug of the government, surely.”

So I asked them, was this the new world we wore as daisies woven in our hair when we were Summer’s children, that land beyond the dreams of avarice?

“You’ve hit the mother lode,” they said— “it all follows a steep bell-curve.